Don’t worry, your friend looking at their phone isn’t ignoring you when you talk — they didn’t even process your voice in the first place. A new study by the University College London showed that concentrating one’s attention on a visual task can render them momentarily “deaf” to normal sounds like speech. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the research highlights how the brain’s visual and auditory processing centers share limited neural resources. When presented with both, the brain has to choose which to devote its attention to. The researchers had 13 volunteers complete visual tasks of increasing difficulty while listening to sounds. Brain scans from the volunteers revealed brain responses to sound were dampened while they engaged in the more difficult tasks. “This was an experimental lab study, which is one of the…